Although I wasn’t totally enamored with Tron: Legacy, I was very happy to see the franchise return after all these years.
While the story and acting didn’t totally deliver for me, Legacy looked great, and at least visually it made a good follow up to the original, which we geeks still love with all our hearts.
It’s amazing to think Tron was a flop when it first came out. Myself and my geek brethren couldn’t wait for it to come out, we loved it once we finally saw it, and before it released Disney thought they had the next Star Wars on their hands. Well, the movie tanked when it came out in July 1982, but the cult of Tron, much like the cult of Blade Runner, has grown very strong over the years. (How many movies that originally flopped get a sequel and a TV series spin-off thirty years later?)
Now The Hollywood Reporter tells us the next Tron movie is “back on the grid,” or back on track at Disney. Joseph Kosinski, who directed Legacy, is going to direct the third installment, and former Warner Brothers executive Alan Horn, who’s now running the Magic Kingdom, is apparently hot to get another Tron up and running.
The studio already hired a new writer to work on the script, Jesse Wigutow, who’s penned a remake of The Crow, and he’s also writing Peter and the Starcatchers, a Peter Pan movie that Gary Ross (The Hunger Games) may direct. David DiGilio, who wrote the Disney snowdog movie Eight Below, authored an earlier draft.
The Reporter tells us that Tron: Legacy was also considered a bit of a disappointment at the box-office, but it made $400 million worldwide, and the fan base is strong enough that Disney’s willing to take another chance on it.
It took some time for people to realize how innovative and ahead of its time Tron was, and with the advent of CGI, people now realize how much ground the original film broke in special effects. The world finally caught up after some years, and they should be there in full force when the third one finally hits theaters.
